Standing in the Shadows of Mozart

This chapter addresses the need for curricular change in higher education from a social justice perspective grounded in an antiracism discursive framework and focuses on music teacher education in large public and private university settings. After a brief discussion of the antiracism framework, I look at some of the historical and current impediments to change unique to music teacher education through a discussion of how those impediments may be reflective of a culture of whiteness in post-secondary institutions. Racial assumptions underlie classical music studies in higher education; those assumptions manifest themselves in our behaviors, educational processes, and educational products. The chapter concludes with several examples of program revisions in music education that have begun to address the types of changes necessary for developing pedagogies of social justice for music teacher education—to move music studies in higher education out of “the shadows of Mozart” and into the twenty-first century.